Public Moral Debate is Dying: The Pastor as Public Intellectual

The Thin Line Between Pastoral Guides and Polymaths

Part of a continuing series on public moral debate, the ways in which it is broken, and ultimately, some modest proposals (next week) for how it might be renewed.

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“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”—Archilochus, 7th c., BC

There’s No Such Thing as Knowing Just One Thing

It would be easy, when faced with complex moral questions to ask for folks to stay in their lanes, to defer to experts all the time. But with ministers in particular, this gets complicated, for reasons I’ll elucidate below.

Long ago, the poet Archilochus uttered a line which would puzzle interpreters ever since. The world can be, it seems, divided into one of two kind of people, those who think in particulars and those who think in terms of the big picture. But beyond that prosaic observation, what exactly Archilochus meant is up for debate. Perhaps this is a commentary on being distracted by many things that matters slightly versus one thing that matters deeply. Maybe it’s that there are those whose minds operate flexibly and with multiple contingencies, and those who think in terms of overall strategy. I tend to think of it with respect to academic interests: there are those who dig into a singular topic their entire career, who tease out the nuances of one topic their entire lives, and those who try to tie all the pieces together into one comprehensive vision.¹

At some level, though, this division is arbitrary. Within the pursuit of knowledge, there’s a range in which we all have to range back and forth more than we’d prefer, if only because any one particular line of action depends on multiple others. To know something about groceries requires knowing something about the household budgets, cooking, and time management. Even if one is more inclined to keeping focus on the One Thing, there’s still lots of supporting elements of knowledge which are relative to the One Thing.

Last time, we looked at the danger of the Public Intellectual, as a kind of public figure who has opinions on any number of things outside their field of expertise, and is given authority for all of those things on which they have no expertise.

So, how do we distinguish this ordinary kind of knowledge acquisition from being a Public Intellectual?

In one way, the difference is one of scope: to know something about teaching Christian ethics, for example, doesn’t require me to know anything about internal workings of the state legislature or about current migration policy. To be a good teacher, I don’t have to be omnicompetent, but have to rather, develop a good sense of deferred judgment: I have to trust the analysis of those closer to the ground, and to resist being the kind of Public Intellectual who is the go-to for all manner of topics. I have my range, and beyond that, I’ve learned to simply say that I don’t know, I’ll work on it, and I’ll find out.

But in another way, it’s the question of authority: though I strive to know One Big Thing (the shape of the Christian moral life), in no way am I an expert on all the supporting things, and have to trust those who spend their lives researching those. If I suspect that the bulk of writing is wrong about something, then it prompts me to form my own judgments more fully, and God forbid, become an expert myself. But knowing supporting things about the One Thing does not make me an expert on these, nor should you look to me as authoritative on them.²

The Pastor and Omnicompetence

The fox and the hedgehog analogy is a perplexing little line that has provided a lot of interpretations since it was revived by Isaiah Berlin in 1953, but in the case of pastors, the temptation runs beyond the the ordinary kind of omnicompetence to being Public Intellectuals.

The Baptist Blogger @BaptistBlogger

Don’t you wish the Apostle Paul had a podcast where he articulated his views on macroeconomics, global finance, banking regulations, medicine, Ukraine, global terror, immigration reform, the death penalty, judicial ethics, agricultural subsidies, New York’s rodent problem…

By virtue of the work, pastors have to develop a robust sense of omnicompetence. This weekend, preaching at a small church outside of Abilene, I went into the restroom to see a urinal taped off, and was reminded again that to be a small-town pastor is to be not only preacher and social worker, but maintenance worker, CPA, small business owner, counselor, and community organizer.

This kind of omnicopetence is in most cases, a virtue of necessity and fits the ordinary range that we described above. To be a pastor, one has to have a competent grasp of multiple intellectual and practical disciplines, and to know when they’re approaching their limits. But two contributing factors push beyond this ordinary range that are worth highlighting:

1. The overgrowth of celebrity pastors. The tweet above references a fairly well-known “Briefing” that offers arm-chair commentary on any number of public topics, often times topics way beyond the competency of the Opinion-Haver. But because the Opinion-Haver is a mover and shaker in a large Baptist denomination, people listen to them and, worse, defer to their judgment on these things outside their scope. This dynamic, made possible by the mechanisms of mass media and mass social media, has been mimicked by any number of pastors seeking a similar kind of influence and platform.³ This would be no problem if the acolytes of the Opinion-Haver didn't succeed, but they frequently do, promoting the idea that being an Opinion-Haver is not only desirable, but blessed.

2. The diminishing influence of ministers upon the moral conscience. I won’t opine for the days in which ministers had more influence and sway over how their congregations lived.⁴ But, for the most part, the role of religious voices over large public issues is pretty muted.⁵ But the competition for morally formative voices is brisk, particularly as attention is fragmented. The "catechesis by public media", particularly on public questions, is well attested to at this point, and thus, ministers are tempted to "speak into" public questions on which they have no real knowledge. This happens for good reasons: people have questions and are looking for answers. But the result here is not that ministers become more morally persuasive, but that they ultimately undermine their credibility about the things about which they might have some expertise, namely, the Scriptures.

You can all name the bully-pulpit/activist ministers that you don’t care for.⁶ But ultimately, the problem is insoluble: insofar as the Christian moral life does not consist solely of “internal” church questions, but questions which church folk bring in from the week, there’s no getting around it. There’s no place (and no virtue!) in hiding from the questions which are brought up, even if the dangers of simply adopting something you read on Axios or Fox or Twitter are real.

So, what to do?

In Praise of the Minister as…Public Intellectual?

You might think that, then, that the minister needs to have nothing to do with the ways of the Public Intellectual.

But I want to make a modest case here, in this way: questions of the moral life are always behind the questions that are ordinarily asked in church, and thus call for ministers to be versed in questions they would perhaps take to be beyond their competence. When we read a passage in Exodus about God drowning the Egyptians, questions about the role of religion in violence is never far behind. When we read about David and Bathsheba, the public role of women and the veracity of women’s speech is at our elbow.

BUT.

The way forward here is not to operate as a pundit, but to operate as a minister. The need for disciplined reflection and theological imagination for public life is real: deference on expertise is not the same as naming the theo-logic which is in play in these questions. In any public question, there is a framing inherent already, and it is part of the ministerial task to help diagnose that framing, in order that the people form a better theological imagination. For example, Scripture has nothing to say about cloning, but it does have a good bit to say about the presumptions of autonomy, bodily possession, and control over our destiny which make cloning possible.

It is this theo-logic is what congregations are in most need of, and are starving to death for: to help them see that another world is possible, not in denial of the one that they live in, but in denial of the terms of the debate which these questions generally come to us in. The minister cannot refuse to answer questions that congregants have, and it will fall to them to cultivate competencies—and to defer willingly!—on areas they are unable to gain competencies in.⁷ But what is needed most of all is a reorientation of the public question back to more fundamental questions of what it means to lead a people into faith, hope, and love in Christ.

To pursue a modest omnicompetence is to pursue a responsible vocation, to acknowledge that humans have limits, and that we need not know all things in order to pursue the One Big Thing. For ministers, most of all, what is needed is for them to do the One Big Thing well: to guide the people back to how Christ, the one over all things, is not afraid of new questions, for frequently, the new questions are just old questions newly asked.

1. In this latter interpretation, I identify with the fox. To look at my writing resume is to either be completely perplexed, or to see something comprehensive coming into view. But that comprehensiveness comes at the price of singularity: on my desk are books on 20th century accounts of ecumenism, migration reform, virtue theory, moral philosophy and politics. But as one who teaches various courses in Christian ethics, this comprehensiveness makes a modicum of sense.

2. There are a small range of things that I consider myself to have expertise in, but I’m constitutionally a generalist with a wide ranging appetite, which trades being an expert in one thing for knowing enough about a wide range of things.

3. This is why, among other reasons, that it’s important that moral exemplars are good: if our exemplars are bad, then they’ll deform us in all kinds of ways.

4. I’m largely suspicious that these days never were. If Paul couldn’t do it, I’m suspicious that this is just a perennial problem.

5. This is not to say that religion doesn’t play a role in public moral questions: far from it! But the influence of religion is largely mishmashed and not centralized around one particular figure. This deserves a lot more attention, and probably for a future issue.

6. This is an equal opportunity criticism: the Public Intellectual minister appears in all kinds of clothes, both conservative and progressive.

7. This is one of the reasons COVID was so hard on the church: the mantras of “do your own research” and “follow the science”, were deferrals to a moving target, and not to a settled body of expertise. Again, another post.